Mumbai: Cisco has announced significant product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio. The company also announced its entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted email.

The new product introductions span real-time and asynchronous collaboration applications.

Among the new unified communications products offered are technologies which help enable secure business-to-business communications over any IP network offering differentiated capabilities for Service Providers.

New Cisco enterprise instant messaging (IM) and presence solutions powered by Jabber XMPP help people find, connect and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside their organization.

Company has also annouced a hosted directory of organizations and locations, which will be similar to a telephone directory but it will list telepresence address, which will help in scheduling of intercompany telepresence meetings. Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.

Cisco's new enterprise social software solutions include a new social video system called Show and Share, which will be similar to Youtube but will have security and policies built in to protect confidential data. This helps enable companies to form secure video communities around user-generated content under enterprise control. It has also introduced enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. This technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

Cisco's hosted email offering, based on the Postpath acquisition, allows IT to move to cloud efficiencies while leveraging their current investment in the Microsoft Outlook client. This directly brings Cisco into close competition of Microsoft and Google. Cisco WebExT Mail hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. The solution has been developed using technology acquired from PostPath.

It also announced, new medianet-enabled products which deliver better collaborative experiences for end-users across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients. Medianet is an intelligent network optimized for rich media.

Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco has announced integration of XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0. This will enhance interoperability across clients, devices and applications. The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.

New media processing engine solutions offer speech-to-text transcription and provide real-time video transcoding, enabling any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device, including HD interoperability for Cisco TelePresence.

An innovative search platform performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time organization-wide cross-application view that allows people to locate and connect with the available experts and information they need.

The new product introductions will be offered to customers as on-premise, on-demand or software-as-a-service solutions, or blended approaches, and can be deployed on a sliding scale of consumption based on business process needs.